President-elect Donald Trump’s policies on illegal immigration, particularly on the border wall and cracking down on sanctuary cities, were at the center of his election campaign. Now, advocates of immigration restriction are hoping for reform to H-1B visas that they say are hurting American workers.

The H-1B is a temporary, non-immigrant visa, currently capped at 85,000 visas a year, that allows employers to hire skilled, specialty workers on a temporary basis -- particularly scientists, engineers, or computer programmers.

However, critics say that the system is rife with abuse, and is no longer a limited short-term program to help employers with unexpected labor shortages in niche areas, and has instead become a way to push out American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor.

“Because of lobbying by the Chamber of Commerce and big tech companies, they’ve succeeded in loosening standards and we’ve seen the increasingly common scenario where American workers are fired, and have to train their replacements,” Dan Stein, President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told FoxNews.com.

Trump has shifted stances somewhat on the visas. After initially taking a hard stance against them, in contrast to some of his Republican opponents, at a primary debate in March he appeared to change his stance and said: “I’m changing. I’m changing. We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in.”

He later released a statement saying the H-1B program “is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.”

“I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions,” he said.

While Sessions’ appointment may put those companies who use the system on edge, analysts say there is still a long way to go in appointments.

“I think companies are in wait-and see mode, By the time of inauguration there’ll be a clearer sense of who will be head of Council of Economic Advisors and the Department of Labor. There’ll be a better sense of the team and that will tell the tech companies something,” Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), told FoxNews.com.

The plight of American workers being replaced was highlighted earlier this year when laid-off Disney IT workers sued the company, claiming that despite high performance ratings, they were made to train their foreign replacements. In February, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from some of those laid off. Presiding over the hearing was Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Adams Nager, economic policy analyst at ITIF, found that unemployment in STEM fields is very low, and concludes that, despite occasional stories of lay-offs, “America faces a shortage of high-skilled STEM talent, especially in IT industries.”

Those opposed to the current state of the program say there are a number of things a Trump administration could do without needing whole-scale reform from Congress.

“One of those is to collect the data and make it available to the public. That would strike horror into the industry,” John Miano, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told FoxNews.com “This has been kept secret or not collected. We don’t know who are getting the visas, we don’t know where the people are, what occupations they’re in or what the salary is.”

Other possible reforms include a clarification on the definition of “specialized knowledge,” which could help cut down on abuse, and a limit on such visas for two years.

Proponents on both side of the issue agree that, despite the pick of Sessions as AG, it is not yet clear which way the administration will fall on the issue. Trump’s official website makes no mention of H-1Bs on the immigration policy page. But those who want significant reform are hopeful in the wake of the Sessions pick.

“H-1B spans the Department of Justice, Labor Department and USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services]. There’s hope you’d have people at all three levels enforcing the law, and Sessions gives us hope they’ll start doing that,” Miano said.

Finally, a detailed account from a slumdog who spent many years committing fraud and deception as a curry-scented wage pirate. The book is free/cheap and doesn't have the usual Hinglish that slumdogs are known to write.

Here are some highlights:

Slumdogs are pushy:

Slumdogs steal shit from the breakroom:

Slumdogs are filthy thieves:

They are obsessed with how much money other people make and will open your mail to find out:

It should be called "H-1B'd" considering how many of these failure stories involve companies who fraudulently claim no Americans are available to work, then fraudulently import workers for their sweatshops.

"...According to News10, "with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B."

“There is going to be an uprising”

...For Sara Blackwell, representing U.S. workers displaced by the federal H1-B visa program began as a gig. Now, it’s a full-blown cause.

The Tampa lawyer has been giving away clients who would distract her from her work. She jokes she’s stopped sleeping and exercising. Recently, she launched a website called ProtectUSworkers.com. “I speak to an average of 10 people a day who are victims of this,” she tells me. “The more I learn about this, the more I have to fight.”

She began by representing IT workers at Walt Disney World in Florida who were replaced by guest workers from India brought in on temporary visas by outsourcing firms that contracted with Disney. She has filed a long-shot conspiracy lawsuit in federal court.

Blackwell contends that the practice of outsourcing low-end, back-office IT jobs to cut costs has become endemic. Globalization, she says, is systematically lowering the standard of living of American workers. “It’s a race to the bottom,” she says.

The Disney case garnered the attention of some in the U.S. Senate, including Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who now is at the forefront of a fight against the American tech industry, which wants to expand the guest-worker program citing a lack of domestic qualified engineers and programmers.

But those tech companies are at the back of the line. According to Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University who tracks applications, outsourcing firms have been crowding out tech companies in the race to acquire the highly coveted H1-B visas, which are capped at 85,000 a year.

Sessions, who is also a fierce opponent of immigration reform, was one of the first U.S. politicians to embrace Trump—and Blackwell has spoken out against the program at several Trump rallies.

She also has consulted with the outsourced employees who worked at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut, including Craig Diangelo.

Part of Diangelo’s frustration—and part of what is driving him toward Trump—is that Washington has done so little to curb what he views as abuses of the H1-B program. There is a greater push now on Capitol Hill to broaden the program rather than rein it in. “There’s nobody to help us,” he tells me. “There’s nobody to say you can’t do this.”

Richard Blumenthal, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, has been part of efforts to expand the program, but also to reform it. “It’s a desperately serious problem,” he says.

He told me that even though there is some bipartisan consensus on reform, efforts still aren’t moving forward, consumed by the same paralysis that’s stalling everything else.

“There are powerful forces against us,” Blumenthal says, “including the companies that exploit these programs.”

To Diangelo, that’s the dilemma of the modern, middle-class voter. He worked hard for years, lost his job when his only transgression was being too old and making too much money, was humiliated when he had to train his replacement, and then watched how state and federal politicians have been able to do nothing to help him.

"The are basically firing me and hiring a foreign worker to do my job at less than half the rate they were paying me," said one IT employee. "They really couldn't find American workers to do this job? Seriously? I am angry as hell."

There has been talk among insurgents for a long time about using RICO statutes against the collaborators who work with the Indian Bodyshops to displace American workers. Finally, someone is doing exactly that:

"Immigration lawyer Sara Blackwell discusses her suit filed against the Disney corporation on behalf of highly-skilled American workers replaced with cheap, foreign labor and completely shut out of their fields of expertise."

Along with Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld, Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times has been covering the ongoing workplace genocide of American techies at Disney, SoCal Edison, and other places. So far, the talk of raising the H-1B cap has resulted in nothing, and the myth of the India's "best and the brightest" saving American companies from IT apocalypse continues to be exposed.

"Perrero's story is becoming woefully familiar -- in fact, several congressional committees have been hearing testimony like it for more than a year. It's the story of how a visa program designed to allow high-tech companies to find foreign workers with advanced degrees and unique skills has been subverted by industries using it to replace American journeyman technology workers with lower-paid workers imported from overseas.

A year ago, the wholesale firing of IT teams at Disney, Southern California Edison, and other tech-dependent companies and their replacement by offshore workers with so-called H-1B visas caused a national scandal. We exposed this loophole at the time, and followed up by showing how Congress connived in the visa subterfuge."

Disclaimer
The thoughts expressed on this blog may or may not be the author's own and are protected
by the 1st Amendment. Any attempt to reveal his identity by contacting a slumdog
hack at Google, or a corrupt Desi sys-admin at his ISP will be dealt with promptly
and severely. Civil and criminal penalties may apply if one is found to have used
private information in an attempt to get the author fired at the Hindu-only I.T.
ghetto he currently works at. In addition, any Desi who attempts to burn the author's
house down because they are enraged over his writing will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. This isn't India.